Lothair
By . New York : D. Appleton & Co.
OF the several reviews of “Lothair” which we have read, all have seemed to us to fail of justice in one important particular. Each of the reviewers had evidently read the book in the light of a deep aversion to the author’s political character. Not one of them had made an attempt to estimate it on its own merits. It was all savagely negative criticism. The fewer kindly critics, on the other hand, have spoken, we imagine, at the prompting of a stubborn a priori enthusiasm and out of the fulness of political sympathy. There is so little profit in criticism of this temper, that we Americans may happily rejoice in the remoteness of the author’s political presence and action. It concerns us chiefly that “ Lothair ” is decidedly amusing. We should call it interesting at once, were it not that we feel this to be in a measure a consecrated, a serious word, and that we cannot bring ourselves to think of “ Lothair ” as a serious work. It is doubtless not as amusing as it might be, with the same elements and a little firmer handling; but it is pleasant reading for a summer’s day. The author has great cleverness, or rather he has a great deal of small cleverness. In great cleverness there must be an element of honest wisdom, we like to imagine, such as “ Lothair”is fatally without. Still, he has cleverness enough to elicit repeatedly the reader’s applause. A certain cleverness is required for getting into difficulties, for creating them and causing them to bristle around you ; and of this peril-seeking faculty Mr. Disraeli possesses an abundant measure. Out of his difficulties he never emerges, so that in the end his talent lies gloriously entombed and enshrined in a vast edifice of accumulated mistakes. The reader persists, however, like a decent chief mourner at a funeral, and patiently waits till the last sod is thrown, till the last block is laid. He puts away the book with an indefinable sense of self-defeated power. Power enough there has been to arouse in his mind the feeling of attention, but not enough to awaken a single genuine impulse of satisfaction. A glance at the character of Mr. Disraeli’s “ difficulties ” will illustrate our meaning. Lothair is a young nobleman (presumably a marquis) of immense wealth, great good looks, great amiability, and a glorious immunity from vulgar family ties. Fate has assigned him two guardians, in the persons of Lord Culloden, a Scotch earl of Presbyterian sympathies, and Cardinal Grandison, an early friend of his father, subsequently promoted to eminence in the Church of Rome. The motive of the romance is not quite what, on the basis of these data, it might have been. It is not the contest between opposing agents for the possession of a great prize, a contest rich in dramatic possibilities and in scenes and situations of striking interest. It is simply the attempt of the Cardinal and his accessaries to convert the young nobleman. There is emphatically no struggle and no resistance, and the reader’s interest is enfeebled in the direct measure of the author’s thoroughly careless and superficial treatment of his material. The grim Scotch Kirk on one side, the cunning Romish Church on the other, the generous young nobleman between, might have furnished the elements of a drama, not remarkable indeed for novelty, but excellent at all events in substance. But here Mr. Disraeli’s deplorable levity begins. The whole book is remarkably easy to laugh at, and yet from the first, one may say, the reader’s imagination, even the American reader’s, is more in earnest than the author’s. Imagination obliges ; if you are to deal in fine things, it is a grievous pity not to do it with a certain force. The Earl of Culloden evaporates at an early stage of the recital; and as for Lothair, he never attains anything like the needful consistency of a hero. One can hardly say that he is weak, for to be weak you must at least begin by being. Throughout the book Lothair remains but a fine name. Round about him are grouped a number of persons of his distinguished “ order,” several of whom are to be conceived as bearing directly upon his fortunes. These portraits are of various shades of merit, those of the lighter characters being decidedly the best. A part of the pleasure of reading “ Lothair ” in London is doubtless to detect the prototypes of the Duke of Brecon and Lord St. Aldegonde, Mr. Phœbus, and Mr. Pinto. We are debarred from this keen satisfaction, but we are free, nevertheless, to apprehend that Lord St. Aldegonde, for instance, has a genuine plausibility of outline.
The author, however, has attempted greater things than this. A hero implies a heroine ; in this case we have three, whose various forms of relation to the hero are happily enough conceived. The Church of Rome, in the person of Cardinal Grandison, having marked him for her own, we are invited to see what part the world shall play in contesting or confirming her influence. We have, in the first place, Lady Corisande, the lovely daughter of a mighty duke, a charming girl and a good Protestant ; in the second, we have Miss Arundel, equally lovely, and a keen Papist; and lastly, we have the “ divine Theodora,” an Italian patriot, married, oddly enough, to a “ gentleman of the South ” of our own country. Corisande appeals to the young nobleman on behalf of his maternal faith and his high responsibilities ; Miss Arundel of course operates in subtle sympathy with the Cardinal ; and the “ divine Theodora ” (delicious title!) complicates matters admirably by seducing the young man into the service of Garibaldi. Such a bountiful admeasurement of womankind makes us only regret the more the provoking immateriality of Lothair. He walks through his part, however, to the fall of the curtain. He assists with Theodora at the battle of Mentana, where they are both wounded, the latter mortally. She survives long enough to extract from her young adorer a promise to resist the allurements of Romanism. But being nursed into convalescence by Miss Arundel, and exposed in his debilitated condition to the machinations of purple monsignori, he becomes so utterly demoralized, so enfeebled in will and bewildered in intellect, that to recover command of his senses he is obliged to fly secretly from Rome. From this point the interest of the story expires. The hero is conducted to the East, but to no very obvious purpose. We hear no more of the Romish conspirators. Miss Arundel goes into a cloister. Lothair returns to England and goes to stay at the residence of Lady Corisande’s ducal parents. He goes with the young lady into her garden and offers her his hand, which she of course accepts ; a very pretty episode, with which the book concludes.
If it can be said to have a ruling idea, that idea is of course to reveal the secret encroachments of the Romish Church. With what accuracy and fidelity these are revealed we are not prepared to say; with what eloquence and force the reader may perhaps infer from what we have said. Mr. Disraeli’s attempt seems to us wholly to lack conviction, let alone passion and fire. His anti-Romish enthusiasm is thoroughly cold and mechanical. Essentially light and superficial throughout, the author is never more so than when he is serious and profound. He indulges in a large number of religious reflections, but we feel inexorably that it is not on such terms as these that religion stands or falls. His ecclesiastics are lay - figures, — his Scarlet Woman is dressed out terribly in the tablecloth, and holds in her hands the drawingroom candlesticks. As a “novel with a purpose,” accordingly, we think Lothair a decided failure. It will make no Cardinal’s ears tingle, and rekindle no very lively sense of peril in any aristocratic brand snatched from the burning. But as a simple work of entertainment we think many of Mr. Disraeli’s critics judge it quite too fiercely, or, what is worse, too ironically. They are rather too hard to please. For ourselves, it has left us much more goodhumored than it found us. We are forever complaining, most of us, of the dreary realism, the hard, sordid, pretentious accuracy, of the typical novel of the period, of the manner of Trollope, of that of Wilkie Collins, of that, in our own country, of such writers as the author of “ Hedged In,” and the author of “ Margaret Howth.” We cry out for a little romance, a particle of poetry, a ray of the ideal. Here we have a novel abounding in the romantic element, and yet for the most part we do little but laugh at it. “ ‘ And where is Mirabel ? ’ said Lothair. ‘ It was a green island in the Adriatic,’ said the lady, ‘ which belonged to Colonel Campian. We lost it in the troubles.’ ” The speaker here is the “ divine Theodora.” “ About sunset Colonel Campian led forth Theodora. She was in female attire, and her long hair, restrained only by a fillet, reached nearly to the ground. Her Olympian brow seemed distended; a phosphoric light glittered in her Hellenic eyes ; a deep pink spot burned upon each of those cheeks usually so immaculately fair.” This is thoroughly regenerate realism, and we find ourselves able to take all that Mr. Disraeli gives us. Nothing is so delightful, an objector may say, as sincere and genuine romance, and nothing so ignoble as the hollow, glittering compound which Mr. Disraeli gives us as a substitute. But we must take what we can get. We shall endure “Lothair ” only so long as Lothair alone puts in a claim for the romantic, for the idea of elegance and opulence and splendor. We find these things neither in the “ Vicar of Bullhampton ” nor in “ Put Yourself in His Place.” A great deal of sarcasm has been lavished upon the gorgeous properties and the superfine diction of Mr. Disraeli’s drama. The author is like the gentleman who tells his architect that he will not have his house spoiled for a few thousand dollars. Jewels, castles, horses, riches of every kind, are poured into the story without measure, without mercy. But there is a certain method, after all, in the writer’s madness. His purpose — his instinct, at least — has been to portray with all possible completeness a purely aristocratic world. He has wished to emphasize the idea, to make a strong statement. He has at least made a striking one. He may not have strictly reproduced a perfect society of “swells,” but he has very fairly reflected one. His novel could have emanated only from a mind thoroughly under the dominion of an almost awful sense of the value and glory of dukes and ducal possessions. That his dukes seem to us very stupid, and his duchesses very silly, is of small importance beside the fact that he has expressed with such lavish generosity the ducal side of the question. It is a very curious fact that Mr. Disraeli’s age and experience, his sovereign opportunities for disenchantment, as one may suppose, should have left him such an almost infantine joy in being one of the initiated among the dukes. When Lothair is invited to dinner, he assents with the remark, “ I suppose a late eight.” As the amiable young nobleman utters these apparently simple words, we catch a glimpse over his shoulder of the elegant author looking askance at the inelegant public and repeating them with gentle rapture. Quite the most interesting point with regard to the work is this frequent betrayal of the possible innocence of one who has been supposed to be nothing if not knowing.